England’s F.A. Charges Mario Balotelli Over Racist Posting

LONDON — The governing body of English soccer said Friday that it had charged Mario Balotelli, the maverick Italian striker who plays for the Premier League club Liverpool, with “an aggravated breach” of its ban on abusive and insulting language in a web posting officials judged to contain anti-semitic and racist slurs.

The action by the body, the Football Association, marked the latest chapter in its attempt to crack down on instances of racial, ethnic and religious abuse among players, managers and fans in the Premier League, whose billion-dollar television contracts have made the 20-club league the richest in world soccer.

The charge against Balotelli hinges on an Instagram post last weekend in which Balotelli reposted an image of the video game character Super Mario — a nickname Balotelli has adopted for himself — that included the passage that has caused a storm. “Don’t be racist!” the text of the posting read. “Be like Mario! He’s an Italian plumber created by Japanese people, who speaks English and looks like a Mexican.” To this was added the phrase: “Jumps like a black man and grabs coins like a Jew.”

In a subsequent Twitter posting, Balotelli — who was born to Ghanaian parents in Italy, and subsequently adopted by an Italian couple who gave him his name — said that his Italian mother, Silvia, “is Jewish, so all you shut up please.” He later added: “The post was meant to be anti-racist with humor. I now understand that out of context it may have the opposite effect. Not all Mexicans have a moustache, not all black people jump high, and not all Jewish people love money.”

The charge against the 24-year-old Balotelli, who faces a potential five-match ban, came as the F.A. conducted an investigation into published remarks about Jewish and Chinese people made by Dave Whelan, the owner of Wigan, another English club.

Whelan, too, faces potentially harsh disciplinary measures if he is formally charged under the F.A. code, a decision that was delayed on Friday. In Balotelli’s case, he was given until Dec. 15 to enter a formal response to the F.A. charge.

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The governing body of English soccer said Friday that it had charged Mario Balotelli with “an aggravated breach” of its ban on abusive and insulting language.CreditPeter Byrne/Press Association, via Associated Press

Whelan, who has denied that his remarks were intended to be offensive, has said that he will sell the Wigan club if he is found guilty.

That would end an involvement with top-flight soccer that began when he was a professional player with two other high-ranked clubs, and before he established one of Britain’s largest sports equipment companies. He ploughed much of his fortune into buying Wigan, and led the club to its greatest triumph, a 1-0 win over Manchester City in the 2013 F.A. Cup final.

For Balotelli, the F.A. charge has the potential to be be career-ending. Liverpool, owned by Fenway Sports Group, an American sports investment company that is the parent company of the Boston Red Sox, warned when it signed the $25-million loan deal that brought Balotelli to the club from Italy last summer that Balotelli was, in effect, on probation.

The club said he would be fired if there was any recurrence of the disciplinary problems arising from a pattern of controversial behavior on and off the field that has seen him commuting between a battery of English and Italian clubs — Internazionale in Milan, Manchester City, A.C. Milan and Liverpool — in the last eight years. Paid a reported $7.5 million by Liverpool for this season, Balotelli has scored only 2 goals in 14 appearances for the club, contributing marginally in what has been the club’s worst early-season performance in years.

Whelan’s initial remarks appeared in an interview in the Guardian newspaper in which he sought to defend his decision to hire Malky Mackay as the club’s new manager, despite Mackay’s being under F.A. investigation for reportedly sending homophobic, sexist and racist text messages in his previous job as manager of Cardiff City. The Guardian reported that Whelan used the word “chink” in remarks about the Cardiff owner, Vincent Tan, who is Malaysian, and also said that “Jewish people chase money more than everybody else.”

Whelan told a television interviewer earlier this week that he did not expect to be found guilty of racism by the F.A. because “I’m absolutely anti-racist, always have been, always will be.” But he appeared to have created new difficulties for himself with an interview in the Jewish Telegraph, in which he rested his defense on the argument that racial and religious epithets were common in Wigan, and not regarded as offensive.

As an example, he cited the way in which people in the city referred to a popular Chinese restaurant. “When I was growing up, we used to call the Chinese ‘chingalings,’” he said. " We weren’t being disrespectful. We used to say, ‘We’re going to eat in ‘chingalings’. That was the name everybody in Wigan called it.”

Correction:

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the status of the club Wigan. It was relegated to England’s second tier, the Championship, at the end of the 2012-13 season; it is not the case that it is currently a Premier League club.